In the mind of Romilius Pollio, the lead-lined pans used for reducing grape juice to must carried no health hazards. The centenarian, a contemporary of Livia and Octavian unknown in the sources save on account of his remarkable age, attributed his health and survival to mulsum (wine sweetened with honey) and olive oil: ‘intus mulso, foris olio’, honeyed wine within, oil without.17 A tombstone in the Roman harbour town of Ostia offers baths, wine and love as a recipe for longevity.18 Livia’s own prescription, shared at the end of her long life, echoes the formula.19 Pliny records her daily indulgence in Pucine wine. This little-known red wine from Istria – a region also noted by the ancients for the excellence of its olive oil – grew on a hilly promontory between Aquilea and Tergeste at the head of the Adriatic, ‘not far from Mount Timavus’.20 Sea breezes buffeted the vineyard, resulting in small, highly prized harvests and, presumably, costly vintages. But Livia was a wealthy woman. Although she was denied the child Octavian craved as his successor, her life was otherwise richly endowed. According to Pliny, ‘there is not a wine that is deemed superior to this for medicinal purposes’. Livia ‘never drank any other’.21 Long life and health became part of her legend. One by one she outlived her enemies. Three times she survived the rigours of pregnancy, twice giving birth to healthy sons who between them achieved an exemplary record of service to the state. She survived flight from the armies of the Triumvirs, famine in Rome, scandal…and the hidden perils of Roman viticulture and sanitation.
Chapter 12
By the side of the goddess
In the Temple of Venus Genetrix, at the centre of the Forum Julium, Julius Caesar had honoured two goddesses with statues. To the first he attributed victory over Pompey the Great at the Battle of Pharsalus. The second was his mistress.
Caesar claimed the first goddess, Venus Genetrix herself, as an ancestress of the Julian clan. He had promised her this temple in return for victory in Thessaly in 48 BC. His mistress was not a mythical figure, although in her home country she enjoyed divine status and sacred attributes. She was associated with the Nile goddess Isis, whom Roman religion in turn affiliated with Venus Genetrix. She was the last Queen of Egypt, Cleopatra VII.
Caesar, Appian tells us, in furnishing the new temple, ‘placed a beautiful image of Cleopatra by the side of the goddess’.1 He spent a million gold pieces on building the forum, complete with marble temple and rostra – the spoils of victory in Gaul.2 Part of that sum was evidently earmarked for Cleopatra’s statue. It was made of gilded bronze, and must certainly have eclipsed its more venerable neighbour.
How Cleopatra responded to this conspicuous compliment we do not know. There is every chance that she saw the statue. At the time, she was living in Rome with her husband Ptolemy, who was also her brother, and her infant son Caesarion, Caesar’s child, born the previous summer.3 The Ptolemiac court had taken up residence in a house belonging to Caesar on the banks of the Tiber probably towards the end of 46 BC. It was not an arrangement which would be seen to reflect credit upon either party. As Cassius Dio recorded, Caesar ‘incurred the greatest censure from all because of his passion for Cleopatra – not now the passion he had displayed in Egypt (for that was a matter of hearsay), but that which was displayed in Rome itself. For she had come to the city with her husband and settled in Caesar’s own house, so that he too derived an ill repute on account of both of them.’4 Caesar’s worship of his earthly goddess, perfunctory as all his dealings with women, was less sacred than profane.
Dio’s account was written more than two centuries after the events it describes. Its portrait of Roman disapproval of Cleopatra represents an attitude towards the Egyptian queen that was neither Dio’s invention nor simple reportage: it was a fiction devised by Octavian. Octavian later exploited for his own purposes memories of the bold impact of Cleopatra’s presence in Rome in 46 BC: her exotic appearance, splendidly dressed, heavily jewelled, her hair elaborately unRoman,5 her olive skin expertly enhanced by cosmetics; the oily deference of her attendant eunuchs and maid-servants; her incestuous, effete co-sovereign husband. Octavian transformed Roman perceptions of Cleopatra into a figure far removed from his ‘father’s’ golden goddess. That he did so changed the course of Livia’s life. His actions were motivated by desire for political conquest.
It came about like this.
Once upon a time, three men met on an island. The time was 43 BC, as we have seen, and the men’s purpose was power. Together they had decided to rule the Roman world. They may or may not have recognized the pitfalls of joint rule. Did each of them long for sole power? Possibly. In 36 BC the three became two, when Marcus Aemilius Lepidus played into the hands of his colleagues by attempting to conquer Sicily. His punishment was expulsion from the Triumvirate, which had three years left to run; he retained until his death the title of Pontifex Maximus. In practical terms Lepidus’s banishment did little to clarify the relative positions of his survivors: Mark Antony retained control of Rome’s eastern provinces; Octavian the west, including Rome itself. The men shared little beyond a common enemy in the Parthians, fearsome on their eastern borders, and the affection of Octavia, fourth wife of the former, elder sister of the latter. It would not be easy for Octavian to compress two into one and govern Rome outright. He required a careful stratagem.
Romans had been at war with Romans on and off for more than half a century – since Livia’s adoptive grandfather Marcus Livius Drusus was killed with that artisan’s knife in the atrium of his house on the Palatine. The victims of battle were Rome’s upper classes as much as her foot soldiers. Twice Proscriptions had depleted aristocratic wealth and power. Fallout from the Ides of March was cruel, bloody and expensive, with fighting at Pharsalus, Thapsus, Munda, Philippi and Perusia throughout the late 40s.6 By the time of Lepidus’s disgrace in 36 BC there were few in Rome who welcomed the prospect of further civil war. In the north of Italy, 170,000 veterans clamoured for their promised settlements of land.7 If Octavian wanted rid of Mark Antony – and he did, despite the emollient intermediary role played by Octavia – he needed a scapegoat to galvanize both military and grass-roots support. He could not otherwise eliminate the man whose popularity at this point eclipsed his own. To little avail the Triumvirs hastened to disparage one another in front of the Senate and the people of Rome, squabbling for pre-eminence. ‘By frequent denunciations before the people Caesar [Octavian] tried to inflame the multitude against Antony. Antony, too, kept sending counter-accusations against Caesar,’ Plutarch records.8 The two Triumvirs had reached gridlock. Both sought a way out. Octavian found his casus belli carved from gold in his ‘father’s’ temple of Venus Genetrix.
The weapon with which Octavian defeated Mark Antony was Cleopatra, one-time paramour of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony’s mistress, mother of three of his children and later his wife. Without Cleopatra, Octavian might never have ruled Rome. Without Cleopatra, Octavian could not have concealed self-interest behind a masquerade of patriotism. Without Cleopatra, Livia would not have achieved the public persona imperial propaganda devised for her and which she in turn embraced with rigour. Cleopatra provided the catalyst in Octavian’s bid for absolute power and, by unwitting contrast, in Octavian’s propaganda, a template of virtuous womanly behaviour to which Livia would adhere lifelong. That Cleopatra did this, of course, was not her own but Octavian’s doing. Cleopatra became Octavian’s fallguy, as she has in part remained throughout history.
In his lengthy treatise Institutio Oratoria, published at the end of the first century AD, the rhetorician Quintilian indicated an important facet of the Roman character. ‘If the Greeks bear away the palm for moral precepts, Rome can produce more striking examples of moral performance, which is a far greater thing.’9
The Romans were a practical, empiricist people. They preferred concrete examples to abstract precepts and attacked problems head-on rather than employing cunning or guile.10 Cicero understood this. We have already seen him elaborate the popular taste for magnificence through the sorry example of tha
t cheese-paring quaestor Quintus Tubero. Octavian understood it too. Since he could not admit publicly his ambition for absolute power, he found concrete grounds for ‘reasonable’ opposition to Mark Antony. Cleopatra provided those grounds.
‘When Caesar had made sufficient preparations,’ Plutarch tells us, ‘a vote was passed to wage war against Cleopatra, and to take away from Antony the authority which he had surrendered to a woman.’11 It was Cleopatra, not Mark Antony, who became the enemy of Octavian and Rome. In Octavian’s version of events, Mark Antony – despite prolonged vilification by his fellow Triumvir – would eventually be incidental. Cleopatra, who had usurped his power and assumed his authority, presented the real danger. At the beginning of 32 BC, she played directly into her adversary’s hands, when it became clear that she meant to accompany Mark Antony on his campaign against Octavian and take a full role in the events she generously subsidized.12 Mark Antony’s failure to force her to return to Egypt appeared to prove the points her opponent had repeatedly made against the couple. For years Octavian had manipulated Cleopatra’s ‘other’ status: her foreignness; her sex; her exoticism, witnessed by Romans during her romantic sojourn in Caesar’s villa a decade earlier; her fertility, which could so easily be made to resemble promiscuity. By these means he had fashioned a personification of ‘anti-Rome’ tangible even to the most practically minded Roman. ‘Caesar said in addition…that the Romans were carrying on war with Mardion the eunuch, and Potheinus, Iras [Cleopatra’s hairdresser] and Charmian her waiting woman, by whom the principal affairs of the government were managed.’13 It was an image that contrasted powerfully with Octavian’s leadership, rooted, as it sought to present itself, in Republican traditions of martial vigour and political collectivism, Rome’s favourite quality of male-focused virtus. In Octavian’s regime, Livia officially stood outside the arena of power; no waiting women, hairdressers or eunuchs influenced the counsels of state. The very distinctness of Cleopatra’s petticoats government was her enemy’s proof of its badness.
It was a policy that reaped dividends for Octavian. But its shilling-shocker sensationalism also made demands on Livia. If Cleopatra’s villainy consisted in large measure of her sex, what then of Livia, who shared that sex? Octavian’s careful branding of Cleopatra necessitated an equally considered reappraisal of Livia’s role and reputation. It was essential that in the eyes of Rome clear blue water separated the two women. But Livia, like Cleopatra, had recently performed the role of mistress. The circumstances of her marriage, as we have seen, were hardly exemplary. We can surmise – although the people of Rome may not have been able to – Claudian hauteur on Livia’s part as powerful as the regal arrogance which had so irked Cicero in Cleopatra. Both were women of education and intelligence. For Cleopatra, the exercise of power was intrinsic to her position as monarch; Livia had been brought up in the dog days of the Republic, when patrician women like Fulvia and Sempronia, though calumniated for their pains, took an increasingly active interest in public affairs. To muddy the waters further, it seems that Octavian himself had not been faithful to Livia since their hasty marriage. No wonder Mark Antony was initially baffled by Octavian’s approach. ‘What’s come over you?’ he wrote to his belligerent colleague. ‘Is it because I go to bed with the queen? But she isn’t my wife, is she? And it isn’t as if it’s something new, is it? Haven’t I been doing it for nine years now? And what about you, is Livia the only woman you go to bed with? I congratulate you, if at the time you read this letter you haven’t also had Tertulla or Terentilla or Rufilla or Salvia Titisenia or the whole lot of them. Does it really matter where you get a stand or who the woman is?’14
The answer was for Livia – inescapably female – to exemplify an assertively Roman concept of womanliness and womanly goodness. The means Octavian chose was portraiture. Beginning in the 30s, Livia sat for a number of official likenesses. Each shares the same streamlined iconography – idealized images that imbue Livia with an appearance of virtue, seriousness and lack of affectation, and a serene, unruffled beauty ultimately derived from historic representations of Greek goddesses.15
In place of Cleopatra’s elaborate eastern hairstyle that kept Iras so busy, Livia wears a simple, lozenge-shaped bun known as the nodus. It sits above her forehead on her hairline. Beneath and behind it, the hair is neatly drawn back into a smaller bun at the nape of the neck. Ovid commended the nodus in his erotic poem Ars Amatoria as flattering female beauty, particularly that of women with rounded faces.16 Although Livia would appear a casebook example of the round-faced woman whom the nodus benefited, the style also recommended itself for more sober reasons. Current since before Livia’s birth, the nodus had strongly Republican connotations. It survives in the carved imagery of Republican tomb reliefs, a visual source of unassailable gravitas.17 It was old-fashioned rather than unfashionable, a political statement as much as a grooming choice.18 It became the principal decorative element of Livia’s early portraits. At the same time, it allied Livia with her sister-in-law Octavia, the first public figure to adopt the nodus – and, on account of her husband’s infidelity, like Livia, Cleopatra’s adversary.
The appearance of virtue alone was not enough. Where Cleopatra was extravagant, Livia must espouse restraint. Lucan’s description written in the first century encapsulates the challenge of Cleopatra for Livia: ‘…the queen, her dangerous beauty heightened by cosmetics,…was decked out in the spoils of the Red Sea. Her head and neck felt the weight of her jewels.’19 Livia wears no jewellery in her early marble portraits; her features do not suggest cosmetic enhancement; details are pared down to a minimum; signs of danger are absent. In his Natural History, Pliny records a later incident in which Livia dedicated a crystal on the Capitoline Hill. The crystal in question was no ordinary lapidary shard but the biggest example of its sort ever seen – a gift presumably to Livia in her capacity as Empress of Rome.20 By then the habit of self-denial, acquired in tacit rebuke to Octavian’s Cleopatra, was deeply ingrained. Instead of accepting the gift, Livia arranged for its display on the Capitoline, where every Roman might see it. Public asceticism had become a presiding virtue of Octavian’s premiership. ‘I detest the Persian style/Of elaboration,’ Horace asserted.
Garlands bore me
Laced up with lime-bark. Don’t run a mile
To find the last rose of summer for me.
None of your fussy attempts to refine
On simple myrtle. Myrtle suits both
You pouring, me drinking, wine
Under the trellised vine’s thick growth.21
The poet might as easily have substituted ‘Egyptian’ for Persian. The luxury of the Ptolemies was a byword of the ancient world. Accounts like Lucan’s description of a royal banquet in Alexandria provided a gaudy foil for Livia and Octavian’s assiduously published restraint: ‘The entrance hall was panelled in ivory, and its doors inlaid with tinted tortoise-shell, the dark patches concealed by emeralds. There were jewel-studded couches, rows of yellow jasper wine-cups on the tables, bright coverlets spread over the sofas.’22 By contrast, Suetonius records the modesty of Octavian’s domestic environment as preserved during the historian’s lifetime: ‘the frugality of his household equipment and furniture is still visible even now from the surviving couches and tables, which are scarcely of a quality for private life.’23
Did Livia protest against this enforced persona? Her subsequent behaviour suggests that she understood all too clearly the importance of appearance to oppose Octavian in an initiative from which both stood to gain so much. Developments which we view from a distance of two thousand years as smooth, coherent and even teleological were likely more fitful and less obvious at the time. Neither Octavian nor Livia invented overnight the ‘Livia’ we inherit today, just as the former’s caricature of Cleopatra evolved over time. It is almost certainly the case that that ‘Livia’ is a fiction grounded in fact, the public virtues ascribed to the figurehead an exaggeration and enhancement of her natural qualities. Continence was the key to
the public Livia, moderate in her actions and inclinations, steadfast in her affections. The ordinariness of Livia’s public persona reflected both the truth and, it has been argued, a long tradition of ascribing to female rulers and consorts the virtues ‘of ordinary women writ large; chaste and fertile, pious and generous, modest but able to speak out at need, emphatically not pursuing an independent policy or building a powerbase’.24
Livia had been brought up in a family with long experience of the demands made by the state on its servants. She understood, too, like the majority of Roman women – Sempronia and Fulvia were exceptions – the disparity between husband and wife. It was in her own interest that Octavian vanquish Mark Antony. In 36 BC, with Lepidus expelled from Sicily, Augustus’s empire remained no more than a possibility. No source records regret on Livia’s part that the sacrifice the gods demanded for victory was Cleopatra. Octavian had set his sights on glittering prizes. Perhaps Livia placed her trust in that laurel sprig which fell to earth at her villa at Prima Porta. Already it had put forth roots and branches.
‘Her beauty, they say, was not, in and of itself, entirely incomparable, nor was it the sort that would amaze those who saw her,’ Plutarch wrote of Cleopatra more than a century after her death. ‘But interaction with her was captivating, and her appearance, along with her persuasiveness in discussion and her character that accompanied all interaction, was stimulating. Her voice was also a source of pleasure.’25 If Plutarch is to be believed, it was to Octavian’s advantage that Cleopatra’s charms revealed themselves only at close quarters. Even during her residence on the banks of the Tiber late in 46 BC, the Egyptian queen can have had few opportunities of casting her spell over the ordinary Roman. Livia, by contrast, was universally acknowledged to be beautiful, Velleius Paterculus’s ‘most eminent of Roman women…in beauty’.
Livia, Empress of Rome Page 12